LN/KM Looking at your work, Michaela, it has a reductive /sculptural edge in its
construction and materiality. Can you tell me about your artistic roots?

MZ My artistic roots can be found as much in contemporary dance as in visual arts.
From early childhood until my teenage years, I received a dance education, covering
ballet as well as contemporary dance. This is an amazing source of energy for me,
and the issue in art that I am dealing with is a translation of this energy.

If you want to draw parallels here to reductive art, I certainly value the clarity
of it, both in form and thought, when it is at its best. And indeed, I studied sculpture
at Chelsea College of Arts (UAL), and developing my performance-based work at that
time is certainly still proving strongly influential in my paintings nowadays.

LN/KM Can you say what prompted your return to painting, and what were the challenges
that you set yourself in this context? Are there any rules or systems that underpin
your practice?

MZ I worked in photography for many years before I returned to painting. Both media
focus on ‘still’ images, and that’s what challenges me: still images that transport
movement.

Dance performances, transmitting high levels of energy, are volatile and fleeting
experiences. I aim for my work to act as a sort of vessel for this concentrated energy.

When getting back to painting, all I knew was that illustration or narration clearly
couldn’t act as an equivalent to the ‘frozen moment’ in a long-exposure photograph.

So I had to develop a different type of technique. Speaking of rules, I am lucky
to be able to recall simple physical exercise steps that enable me to get into a
physical and mental state in which movements can be done almost automatically, to
support the transformation process of energy into materiality.

LN/KM Your work fits into an expanded field of painting. Can you explain your approach
to painting within the culture of new media and digital technology?

MZ The digital context is certainly an important issue when talking about contemporary
painting. Simultaneously, there seems to be a growing attentiveness towards the theme
of the body in new media (as in ‘virtual bodies’ at NRW Forum, Düsseldorf).

Finding myself working with and looking at screens with increasing frequency, I am
glad that painting involves a different materiality and the use of my whole body.

Nevertheless there is an aspect to the PE film in my work that refers to the shiny
surface of a lit screen, including its characteristic reflection.

The popularity of selfies can be seen as a longing for physical reassurance in our
daily use of screens. They also indicate a heightened narcissism that is part and
parcel of a highly individualized society. The PE film parts of the painting provide
the opportunity for a continuous selfie, but it is a self-image that changes when
the viewer’s ‘real’ body moves.

LN/KM That’s an interesting idea; how does it affect the way you decide how the
works are distributed and staged in the space?

MZ An important focus of my work has always been to explore the different possibilities
of the spatial conditions we move within, and the images we create of these conditions.
It is in that context that I think about the significance of the installation of
objects and paintings within a space. Although each work needs breathing space, it
also needs to be placed in a way that opens up surprises, by acting jointly with
its surroundings and the other objects.

In the exhibition CMYK at Fold I worked closely with Kim Savage, the director of
the gallery, who has a great understanding of space. Our aim was to take the audience
on a journey that opened, for example, with two very different paintings next to
each other: the oldest in the show (from 2013) and one of the newest ones. They were
an odd pair to me, and I was very sceptical in the beginning. But Kim’s choice really
convinced me in the end. Further into the gallery space we built a kind of gateway
with two black ‘guards’ that led to a very light and airy space of magenta, yellow
and white.

I regard the placing works of art in an environment as an installation, and as such
it is a similar process to making art in any other medium.

LN/KM Your work has a painterly sense of humour. What underpins the choices that
you make? How do you develop your ideas and concepts?

MZ Humour does indeed come into the work at times, especially when I come to cross
the borders of ‘no-go areas’ within a medium. When certain rules apply - for instance,
in abstract painting, concerning the flat surface - I enjoy introducing ‘light’ that
can be read either simply, as a lighter colour, or as opening the painterly plane
to perspective.

LN/KM Can you talk about the formal devices in your practice, and say something
concerning the temporal/temporary aspects that exist within your work?

MZ The use of plastics in art has become ambivalent. Once, the material triggered
a notion of modernity, whereas now it might be seen as indicating something cheap
or ordinary. I am interested in the latter impression, as a provocative contradiction
to plastic’s seductive shiny surface. The concept of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art that emerged
from Arte Povera, and which has also been significant in Provisional Painting, informs
my work.

A phrase recently caught my attention. This was “the importance of actually making
the nothingness”* in the context of a discussion about nihilism and shaping a (sculptural)
anti-form. In my work it is not so much the nothingness, it is more the transitory
that I am interested in.

(*Dr Helmut Draxler, Professor of Art Theory at The University of Applied Arts, Vienna,
in conversation with Alexi Kukuljevic at Tanya Leighton Gallery, March 2016)

LN/KM That concept of the transitory (everything in flux) does indeed seem critical
to your approach. Can you clarify how this has had an impact upon you?

MZ If you look at art as a constant process of construction and deconstruction,
the tendency of the more interesting works of art in the recent past was certainly
to deconstruct, and to form an antithesis to a socially and politically defined reality.
Unfortunately, every single ‘no’ quickly turned into a ‘yes’; even worse, it became
fashionable.

Recent approaches in physics and philosophy are looking (again) at non-linear models
of time: Karen Barad, for example, when she talks about ‘space-time-matter’, and
the re-discovery of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time from 1962.

It is within this discussion that the transitory provides a convincing alternative
to the ‘black and white’. Instead of ‘all or nothing’ there is a ‘something that
constantly changes’. Nature is the best example, really.

My latest group show, jurassiccontemporary, which I worked on with Alexandra Hopf,
was based on the idea of time shifts and interchanging models of past, present and
future.

LN/KM Works such as 160105 and 160106 have a certain speed and tension about their
surface, compared to 150404, where tonal shifts glide under the surface. What role
does this opacity/transparency play, through the use of PE plastic and its relationship
with the layered surface facture?

MZ It is interesting that the word ‘speed’ always evokes the notion of ‘fast speed’
first. Focusing on both, fast and slow motion, and situations where they blend into
each other, has always been an aspect of my work.

Mind you, even when a line appears to be ‘fast’, this might have resulted from a
slow movement which accelerated from a certain intensity that wasn’t fast at all.

As for gesture, there are different approaches in my paintings.

The lines that originate from a concentrated single movement are mostly applied to
white canvas that is only primed. They take a long time in their (mainly physical)
preparation, but are than executed quickly. Even with the best preparation, a lot
of them end up unresolved and get destroyed, since they can’t be corrected.

In the multi-layered paintings all sorts of mark-making takes place. These resemble
walls in the street where you can see left-overs from many signs and tags over a
long period of time. The longer you look at them, the more traces you discover.

The paintings are based on numerous layers of paint, which are applied and then often
taken away, again and again. This process is time-consuming and very difficult to
control, since the aim is not a spectacular composition, but a rather quiet one that
unfolds only slowly. A similar ‘gradualness in the investigation process’ is also
required from the viewer, if he or she is to be rewarded.

It is the topic of time and speed that I am focusing on here.

LN/KM What is your relationship to contemporary painting? Can you talk about your
connections to conceptual and traditional abstraction?

MZ As much as my approach to painting is conceptual, it is based on a deep love
of the painterly. This proves of course to be a fine line, but again, it is the crossing-over
that I am interested in.

Over the last few years there has been a strong focus on conceptual painting, at
least in the art scene I’ve been involved with. Only recently has there been a shift
towards the painterly again.

Of course there have always been artists around, who have combined both approaches.
Judy Millar is a great example; her grand gestural paintings are at the same time
clearly conceptual. Her paintings are full of light and depth with a profound affinity
to the painterly, and at the same time clearly conceptual in their references to
print-making, repetition, and recently also to cinema and film.

Henning Strassburger is another artist with strong painterly qualities, as is Florian
Schmidt.

There are many more artists whose work I consider important, on the verge of these
different approaches, and with whom I have been lucky enough to work and show over
the last few years.

LN/KM Given that you have worked and exhibited as an artist in Germany and in
the UK, how do you perceive the contemporary art scene in each country? Have you
noticed this hybridity between a more rational/ conceptual approach and something
more intuitive?

MZ While there is a strong affiliation to the narrative in the UK, German painters
have the burden of Kippenberger and co. looking constantly over their shoulders.
We keep burying painting and digging it out again.

British painters seem to have an approach more in common with gardening - pruning
and training rather than completely uprooting.

LN/KM What are your plans for the future in your practice; where do you see it
moving towards?